Defending the Truth, page 20
“Nice of you to come, Timmy,” Buchanan said. “You get notice of this yesterday?”
“Yes, sir. But I didn’t think I had to jump just because Rabb wants to talk to you.”
“Well, that’s part of what judges are for, Timmy, to talk to lawyers when asked. So settle back, and let’s hear what’s on Mr. Rabb’s mind.” He nodded to Joshua.
“Your Honor, next Monday is presently set for the sentencing of my daughter and the other four students.”
The judge nodded.
“I think that the interests of justice require that the sentencing be postponed. There are two witnesses to the bombing of Ollie Friedkind’s car who say it was a gray-haired man in a gray silk suit, definitely not one of the student demonstrators.”
“But you pled the five guilty,” Essert said. “What’s this, you want to withdraw the plea? I’ll damn well let you. Then I’ll dismiss and Stevens will file murder charges in state court.”
Joshua shook his head. “No, they picketed and paraded, and they’ll face whatever consequence Your Honor deems appropriate. But I think it’s a very material element of Your Honor’s decision on the appropriate sentence to know whether Ollie’s murder had anything whatsoever to do with the demonstration. I think that justice would be properly served by giving us a few months time to find the real killer. The five students aren’t going anywhere. There’s no need for haste.”
Judge Buchanan looked at Essert. “I understand you got a grand jury to indict Mr. Rabb, then bussed the whole bunch of them a hundred twenty miles up to Phoenix to return the indictment to Fred Coxon.”
Essert nodded, the blood beginning to drain from his cheeks.
“Why’d you do that, Timmy?” The judge’s voice was soft and ominous.
“Judge Coxon’s the chief judge. Under Rule 18 he has jurisdiction.”
“I’m not talking about jurisdiction, Timmy.” Buchanan’s voice was louder, more insistent. “I’m talking about you bringing a felony indictment against a fellow member of the bar and running up to Phoenix to get him prosecuted. Have you got one little piece of evidence that Mr. Rabb committed a felony.”
Essert was indignant. “He’s defending a Commie in court, and his own daughter is out in front of the courthouse carrying a placard which also defends the Commie.”
“You got what, six, seven kids?” Buchanan asked.
Essert nodded.
“Oldest one is a senior over at Tucson High, seventeen, eighteen, as I remember.”
“Seventeen.”
“And he always does exactly what you tell him, and nothing he does ever surprises you?”
Essert swallowed. “Orders from Phoenix,” he mumbled.
Buchanan nodded, his steel gray eyebrows bunched over glistening eyes. “You’re a real man of honor, Timmy my boy.” Turning to Joshua. “You’ve got a continuance, Mr. Rabb. How about December, during the winter recess over at the U of A?”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Joshua said.
“I’ll issue the order,” said the judge.
Chapter 17
Chuy Leyva had never been this cold before. Nobody had ever been this cold before. Winter in southern Arizona started in late December, and the temperatures were generally in the fifties or sixties during the day and almost never below twenty-five at night. It snowed every five years or so in Tucson, and the fluffy white stuff would cling to the cacti and trees and ground for a few hours until the sun would melt it by mid-morning.
Korea, in the hills twenty miles north of the Hwachon Reservoir, was different. Winter began here in late August. The ground was frozen, the vegetation dead, and everyone and everything was buried in a foot of icy snow. Even when the sun shined, it was rarely over twenty degrees.
The oil on Chuy’s and his company’s M-l rifles congealed, and it took hours with fingers burning and stiff from the cold to strip the weapons, remove the oil with solvent, and apply graphite lubricant. They were issued heavy woolen mittens with leather shells, but they couldn’t operate their weapons with them, so most of the time they had to wear thin wool gloves.
They were issued white canvas bags to put over their boots, but frostbite was still a serious danger. All along the western edge of a several-square-mile circular plateau called the “Punchbowl,” in the Taebaek Mountains of east central Korea, elements of the First Marine Division were dug in, the men burrowed into foxholes and crevices and caves and huddled over the small flames of C-ration heating candles.
Chuy’s company commander, Captain DeFazio from Newark, New Jersey, had experience with a lot more cold weather than Chuy, but he didn’t look any happier or more comfortable than the rest of his men.
“First Regiment takes the main thrust up Hill 983,” he said to Chuy, pointing at the map tacked up on a two-foot-square corkboard on a rickety easel in the command post, a sagging canvas tent poorly lit by kerosene lanterns and pulsating klieg lights.
“Bloody Ridge?” Chuy murmured. “Second Division already lost a couple thousand guys up there.”
The captain nodded. “Now it’s our turn.”
A small potbellied stove, stolen—“liberated” as they called it—from some farmhouse along the way, belched forth black smoke and little warmth in the corner of the tent.
“The other regiments will cover your flanks, second on your left, third and fifth on your right.”
“What’s on the hill?” Chuy asked.
“Fuck if I know.” DeFazio shrugged.
“Why are we taking it?”
“Because some little bastard with eagles on his collar says so. And a skinny, tall shit with stars on his collar says so. And I guess some guy farther up the pole says so, too.”
Chuy nodded, his face grim. “When?”
“Tomorrow, oh six hundred.”
“Who we up against?”
“Chinks. At least a division, maybe a whole army.”
Chuy grimaced. The North Korean People’s Army hadn’t proved to be particularly devoted to getting themselves killed, at least in the half-dozen skirmishes that his regiment had been in with them. But the Chinese forces were different. They were so reckless of life in battle that they seemed to the Americans virtually to be suicidal. They were poorly clothed and many wore rags for boots, but they didn’t seem to be debilitated by the cold and the snow.
When the war had begun over a year ago, General MacArthur had chased the North Korean invaders back past the 38th parallel all the way to the Yalu River and Manchuria. But in November the Red Chinese had entered the war and counterattacked against the U.N. forces and pushed them down the South Korean mainland past Seoul, the capital. It took three harrowing, bloody months for the U.N. forces to free Seoul from the Communists, and the American soldiers had learned great respect for the Chinese.
Armistice negotiations had begun at Kaesong in North Korea in July, but is seemed to Chuy that the only fruit of these peace talks had been even more brutal battles with endless armies of Chinese and North Koreans. The negotiations had broken off completely by the end of August, and the marines had been ordered to capture the “strategic heights” north of the city of Yanggu, which Captain DeFazio called “va fangu.”
“Strategic?” Chuy had asked DeFazio. The captain had shrugged as he always did when he had no answer. “Fuck do I know,” he had muttered. “When X Corps says it’s strategic, I stop asking questions. That way maybe I get to be a major and get the hell out of this rathole.”
Chuy’s D Company had been in the fighting around the “Punchbowl” for almost two weeks now. Twenty-three of his men had been killed and thirty-nine wounded, reducing his company to a hundred two men. As far as he could tell, the other companies of the regiment had suffered equally. Not since the first wave of Allied forces came ashore in Normandy on D day, or the invasion of Salerno beach in Italy, had such a high percentage of casualties been suffered by any American forces.
Chuy walked back to his company area as Chinese 88-millimeter mortars began raining down near the foxholes. Two American “Long Tom” 155-millimeter cannons responded almost immediately, raising clouds of dirt on Bloody Ridge. But it was just a nightly exercise with exorbitant sound and fury and no efficacy. The mortars were too far away from the Americans to be reliable, and the Chinese were dug into bunkers so heavily fortified that day after day of bombing strikes by marine Corsairs hadn’t made an observable dent in them. The only thing the Corsairs had accomplished was to obliterate a half-dozen Soviet built T-34 tanks in the shallow valley behind Bloody Ridge.
It was another sleepless night for Chuy. If the random mortar sounds and Long Tom cannon fire did nothing else, they kept everyone awake. The noise, first of all. But even if they had been silent explosions, the fear made your skin crawl and your scalp pucker and your throat go dry, so that by six o’clock in the morning, the entire First Regiment had but two choices to make: run like hell to the Punchbowl away from Bloody Ridge and beg to be taken to the aid station in shell shock, or run like hell up the hill toward the fortified ridge above. When Chuy gave the order “take the hill,” some of the men chose the Punchbowl and most chose the ridge, but all of them were equally terrified.
A dozen M-26 Pershing tanks roared up to the edge of the hill to provide cover fire for the marines. The tanks’ machine guns raked the rutted, frozen ground a hundred yards ahead of the assault troops, and their light cannons raised feathery puffs of dirt and snow just below the ridge. It was enough to give the marines time to climb into relative safety in the gulleys and crevices halfway up the hill.
Chuy huddled shivering in an icy crevice just wide enough for him to lie sideways in. He was sweating heavily, the droplets turning to tiny icicles on his chin. His breath was a thick shroud of steam.
I’ll wait here until my men have rested and gotten back their wind, Chuy thought, trying to make himself reason sanely. Then we’ll go up. I like it here, I’m safe and warm.
A mortal shell burst a few yards above him and covered him in frozen clods of dirt and ice. He struggled to free himself and not be buried alive. He started running up the hill, firing wildly in front of him with his rifle. An empty clip sprang out of the chamber, and he frantically took a loaded one out of his ammunition belt and pushed it home. He was followed now by a few of his men, then fifty, then the entire company. They fired indiscriminately ahead as they scrambled up the hill.
Machine-gun fire close ahead jarred Chuy to a halt. He stood straight up, confused, rigid with fright. But to his men he must have appeared to be a fearless commander, puffing out his chest at the enemy.
A bullet whizzed through the sleeve of his field jacket and terrified him into action. He could see the burp gunner about thirty yards ahead behind an outcropping of rocks that had been leveled by the bombing and shelling.
“Fireman!” Chuy called out.
The lance corporal carrying the flamethrower crawled toward him on hands and knees.
“There! Over there!” hollered Chuy, pointing at the rocks.
The fireman rose to his knees and pulled the flamethrower nozzle from its holster. He pointed the three-foot steel pipe toward the rocks and pulled the trigger. A swath of flame leaped toward the target but fell several feet short. The burp gunner stood up and fired a short burst, and the fireman crumpled to the ground.
Chuy ran to him and wrested the pipe from his hands. He turned and fired it toward the rocks. Again it fell short. Too damn far, he thought, got to get closer.
He lay beside the dead corporal and freed the steel tank from his back. He put his arms through the shoulder straps and struggled it onto his back. He rolled over, scrambled to his knees, then leaped up and began running up the hill screaming crazily, following the steady stream of fire from the flamethrower.
There was not one burp gunner but three. The flames engulfed them and the rocks. Two of them came running out from cover, aflame. They ran down the hill past Chuy into a barrage of rifle fire. Chuy felt a bullet hit his thigh, and he tumbled to the ground. Must have been one of his own men, shooting wildly. But he was suddenly strangely calm. He felt the warm blood spilling on his leg, and it felt warm and good. Odd, no pain.
He stood up, erect and insane, and bellowed out, “Up the hill, men.”
There was a sudden flash of John Wayne before his mind’s eye, The Sands of Iwo Jima, storming Mount Suribachi. He smiled at the image and called out, “Follow me!” But John Wayne had died at the end of that charge, hadn’t he?
He spewed a twenty-five-yard-long path of flame before him and climbed the hill. The gelatinized fuel ran out after a hundred yards, and he pulled off the tank and threw it on the ground. He held his rifle high and yelled, “Come on, men, we got ‘em now!”
Every stupid cavalry charge from the cavalry and Indian movies he had seen kaleidoscoped in his mind: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Goddamn, I am John Wayne. I really am. I’m in charge of the cavalry. But that’s crazy. Aren’t I always the Indian? Men were running, smallish men in padded cotton uniforms. Dozens of them, hundreds. Chuy was on the ridge of the hill now. He could see what looked like an entire battalion of soldiers in flight down the other side of the hill. He raised his M-l and began firing at their backs. Suddenly he felt something thud against his back, and he sprawled forward in a heap.
He awoke in a rear area field hospital, a huge tent with rows of bunks. He didn’t know how long he had been lying there, but it was warm, so who cared. He had a splitting headache, and a little gauze patch was taped over his right hip. He felt all over his body, and nothing was missing. He didn’t remember anything about being wounded except the warm blood running down his thigh.
“Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” came a deep voice somewhere near his head.
Chuy squinted and shook his head, trying to bring the owner of the voice into focus. It was a tall man dressed in a wrinkled white robe.
“You’ve suffered a concussion,” the man said. “Nothing serious. You’ll have a headache for a couple of days. I’m going to put you to sleep. When you wake up, you’ll be in Pusan. You did one hell of a job up there, Marine.”
The man’s face almost became focused, but the pain of squinting and trying was too much. Chuy drifted off to sleep.
He saw Pusan from the tiny square tail door window of an ambulance, and it would always be for him a fleeting image of cement rubble and sagging thatched roofs and the superstructures of numerous naval vessels in the harbor. He was carried out of the ambulance and deposited, groggy and only half-conscious, in a small sick bay in the belly of a hospital ship. There was a porthole that looked out on the Straits of Korea, crowded with boats and ships of every shape and size.
Three other men were with him in the tiny room, and they appeared to be in much worse shape than he was. He lay back, his head splitting with pain, his vision bleary, and closed his eyes. A navy hospital corpsman came into the room, pulled up the sleeve of the hospital gown, gave him a shot, and he awoke again in an ambulance being unloaded next to a huge sign:
8TH ARMY GENERAL HOSPITAL TOKYO
UNITED STATES OCCUPATION FORCES
This was a white-walled, clean building with female nurses in army uniforms and real hospital gurneys instead of canvas stretchers. Chuy’s headache had mostly abated, and his vision was clear. He was wheeled into a small room and left unattended. He felt himself again to make sure he had all of his parts.
“Throw on your class A’s, Lieutenant. You got a public appearance.” The corpsman shook Chuy’s arm lightly.
The abruptness of waking up sent a pain shooting between Chuy’s eyes. He squinted his eyes shut and waited for the pain to subside.
“What’s up?” he asked. His voice sounded to him like someone else’s.
“You’re a hero, sir. You’re getting the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
“The what?” Chuy swung his legs slowly over the side of the bed. A needle-sharp pain in his hip made him grimace.
“The Congressional Medal of Honor, Lieutenant. You and two other guys from the First Marine Division.”
Chuy looked at him quizzically. “What the hell did I do?”
“Took on the whole Chinese army, led your whole battalion up Bloody Ridge and secured it.”
“Only thing I remember is something hitting me in the back, threw me ten feet.”
“Yeah, one of our own artillery shells hit near you, killed a bunch of your men, gave you a pretty good concussion, and a piece of shrapnel tore a piece of skin off your hip. You’ll be okay in a couple of days.”
Chuy stood up and waited for the room to stop swaying. “Where do I have to go?”
“Auditorium, just down the corridor a ways.”
“I don’t know if I can walk that far.”
“You got to, Lieutenant. Orders from General Van Fleet. They need to have you to hand the citation to. The two other guys are both posthumous.”
“What’s that?”
“Dead, sir. That’s why the brass wants you on your feet looking like a hero.”
Chuy took off the hospital gown and put on the wrinkled winter dress uniform from his overseas bag. It was thick wool, and he smoothed it over his chest and legs. The poplin shirt collar and the top of the linen necktie were all that showed above the lapels of the jacket.
“I got orders for something else, too,” the corpsman said. He walked up to Chuy, took the single silver bars off the epaulets, and placed two double bars on them.
“Not bad, Captain,” the corpsman said, standing back and looking Chuy over. “You ready?”
Chuy shrugged.
“Come on, I’ll help you until the end of the hallway. Don’t fall down on me. Anybody sees it, I’ll end up in some fuckin’ front line MASH unit up by Pyongyang getting my dick shot off.”
They walked slowly down the corridor, and Chuy quickly got his legs and his balance. There was very little headache pain left.
“When did this all happen?” he asked.
